How to boulder two days in a row without wrecking the second day

“How bad is it to climb two days in a row?”

Not bad at all, if one of the days is easy. Two easy days in a row is just climbing. The trouble starts with two hard days. The second one begins with fingers that haven’t recovered from the first, so you try the same hard moves weaker and your fingers take a heavy load twice with no break. That’s the day people tweak something, or go home feeling like they’ve got worse.

What counts as a hard day

Anything that loads your fingers close to their max, or leaves you wrecked:

• limit bouldering, or projecting at your limit
• a board session on problems near your limit
• max hangs or repeaters on a hangboard
• pump sessions like 4x4s

Count them together. A board session and a hangboard session on the same day make one hard day. A board session on Monday and hangs on Tuesday make two in a row.

What day two should look like

Easy enough that you’d feel fine doing it again tomorrow. Stay well below your flash grade and give the session a job that isn’t effort:

1. A gentle warm-up that mixes mobility with easy boulders.
2. A technique drill, like slow-motion climbing, or an easy skill bite with one rule, such as quiet feet.
3. Something that keeps you moving: climbing with flow on easy problems, or an easy traverse where you could still hold a conversation.
4. A forearm flush, so you finish less pumped than you started.

Leave the hangboard alone that day, and skip anything you’d call a project.

Hard day first, then easy

Put the hard session on the first day, straight after a rest day, when your fingers are fresh. The easy session the day after gets you moving without asking much of them.

The other way round works too, as long as the easy day really is easy. The version that goes wrong is a “moderate” first day that drifts into a hard one, followed by a limit session the next day.

Building up to more

If two days in a row already leaves you flat, keep the second day easy for now. Add training one step at a time:

• Start with the easy second day and keep it easy for a few weeks.
• Once you come into your next hard session as fresh as before, make day two a little longer, or climb a little closer to your flash grade.
• Keep two limit sessions a week as your cap. Three is for climbers who’ve trained for years, and never on three days in a row. Two on and one off is the common pattern.

When day two should be a rest day

Take the day off instead if your fingers feel stiff in the morning, your skin’s raw, or the first easy boulders feel heavy. If a finger hurts, see a physio before you train it again.

Who this isn’t for

If you only climb twice a week, don’t put the sessions back to back. Spread them out with two or three days between, like the week in two sessions a week, and give each one a job of its own. The free four-week plans come in 2, 3 and 4 days a week.